Digital lemonade kids: the rise of digitally native vertical brands
Like kids selling lemonade on a street corner, the new wave of entrepreneurs are bypassing the middleman and targeting consumers directly.
The long, hard road to simple marketing
Marketers seduced by simple are less enthusiastic about getting into bed with the Hydra-headed, multi-limbed creature of complexity.
If fear is fuel for creatives, be very afraid
Yes, fear can paralyse - and, in isolated moments, it does. But it can also galvanise, and in the great sweep of the creative adventure, that is its salient role.
Call yourself a marketer?
Any marketer not working backwards from a deep understanding of their customers' needs, lives and the cultural milieu that surrounds them, is failing at the most elemental part of the job they are paid for.
There's something about Scandinavian brands
Scandinavian brands bear a stamp of open duality. They embrace the extremes of individual genius in their creation and ubiquitous benefit in their application.
Is brand love a marketing myth?
"Love" is a short word but a huge one, which seeks to convey the profound emotions that give meaning to close human relationships. Can it be justifiably extended to brands?
Three basic questions for marketers in 2018
In the face of unreliable colleagues, unpredictable events, mercurial consumers, vicious competitors, rampant disrupters, lurching currency movements and shaky supply chains, any success we gain as marketers will be hard won and at least partly down to luck.
How to master the art of brand reappraisal
Some of the most insidious branding problems start out as virtues. Familiarity is one of them. Without it, where would a brand be?
Big Consumer is watching you
The dystopian narratives of the 20th century encouraged in entire generations a healthy dread of state surveillance. Turns out it's not Big Brother doing the snooping. It's us - marketers - "lensing in" on personal privacy.
In a jam with activist investors
Marketers with portfolios suffering flat sales and poor recent growth tend to resort to a standard riposte - they're "building brands for the long term".
Is your customer experience working?
At its best, work is a noble thing - an enriching part of a fulfilled life. That said, for some, it will never be more than a means to an end, a transactional life necessity. Either way, brands have no business adding to the list of life's dreary, unpaid chores.
Let new ideas face the fire
Interesting things can happen when originators put up a sustained, impassioned defence of their ideas in the face of hostility or indifference.
Brands don't always require heroes
Chest-beating CVs that boast about high-risk repositioning strategies sit at odds with the slow-nurturing subtlety that would benefit most brands.
Five qualities that make a prized marketing leader
With the awards season upon us, what qualities do the people behind the winning brands share?
How 'life brands' can serve a social purpose
More than ever, we need brands that reflect our identity even as we change.
Global marketing can be a thankless job but it can achieve great things
There is something noble in the persistence that keeps global marketers going in the face of all odds.
M&S needs to make peace with its over-50 fashion customers
M&S needs to focus on the over-fifties, the age group that is, according to statistics, behind more business start-ups than any other.
Online ratings and other user feedback aren't that useful
Online user ratings and the extent to which consumers trust them as indicators of objective quality aren't as closely related as marketers may think.
Car brands beware: you could be on a collision course to consumer contempt
Could cars be driving towards banking levels of consumer contempt?
Labour and Tory parties' ad agencies: what's the difference?
Labour has chosen Krow and the Conservatives are in talks with M&C Saatchi, but what's the difference to voters?